Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
Interpretation
Rewriting is essential in creating a cohesive and impactful narrative in storytelling.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes the importance of rewriting in the creative process, particularly in writing. It suggests that rewriting goes beyond just refining dialogue; it encompasses the overall structure, pacing, and transitions of scenes, which are crucial for effective storytelling. Stoppard highlights that careful consideration of how scenes are organized and presented can greatly enhance the narrative and its emotional impact on the audience.
In practice
In a writing workshop, I shared Stoppard's quote to emphasize the necessity of revisiting our drafts.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
The silent thing onstage allows for a kind of intimacy that no conversation can have. If I just shut up, we're forced to look at each other and really confront that moment.
I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
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